Putting effort into Twitter for your business may help with SEO as well

For a while now there has been quite a bit of interest in the possible SEO benefits from Twitter, especially if you have a lot of followers and activity (or both).

Why is there so much interest? A presence on Twitter offers quite a number of ways to get inbound links to your site.

Besides the link from your Twitter home page (which can bring quite a bit of traffic on its own), there is also potential back links from: shortened urls in your tweets, retweets of your tweets by others, back links from sites and blogs that have embedded your tweets and back links from Twitter spin-offs such as Paper.li or Hootsuite.

The big question is: how much importance does Google give to back links from Twitter or activity on Twitter and associated sites?

Until recently it was considered, not that much. But I believe things are changing in the way Google view links from Twitter and they're changing fast.

Webmaster Tools shows big increase in links from Twitter

Just how much became obvious to me when I was recently reviewing the Google Web Master Tools "Links to your site" report for Really Simple SEO. This showed a big increase in in-bound links from Twitter. The backlinks links from Twitter outnumber those from any other source by a substantial margin and by looking into the detail it was obvious that Google have noticed every back-link and source.

Of course just because Google is recording inbound links from Twitter it doesn't mean these links are going to add any great value to your website's position in Google. Maybe not, but if you consider them in relation to other ways Google is noticing Twitter they may be more important than you might think.

Other factors include Google Realtime and indexed tweets

These other factors include: Google Realtime, indexed tweets and anecdotal evident that Google is taking much more notice of website pages made popular in Twitter than it used to.

As always with the search engines you know nothing for sure, but it is looking a safe bet that building and developing your Twitter business marketing may show greater dividends than just from Twitter itself.

Comments

Need more backlinks? Twitter can give you hundreds (as recorded by Google). — 7 Comments

We have maintained our Twitter account with a link to our website for over 3 months, posting regularly and using shortened URL’s pointing to the website in our tweets. Our website still shows 0 backlinks from Twitter. Is is because smth has changed since you posted this article or we’re doing something wrong?

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